Links and accomplishments, 8/2/15 to 8/8/15

Links

You’re a stage magician. Practiced in the art of illusion… One of your greatest skills is misdirection. You seed the truth of the magic trick early on in the story. Then you convince the reader that the truth isn’t the truth at all — until the time comes to reveal.

Reminds me very much of Uncle Jim’s enigmatic lectures at VP, exhorting us to read books on stage magic.

Pretend while writing that your job isn’t to tell a story but it’s to manipulate and emotionally injure the audience. Because that actually kinda is your job. You monster.

How to Write Your Character’s Thoughts. Seems simple, right? But I’ve been trying to shake up how I do this, because for me italicizing thoughts is the lazy path to over-explaining. I’ve been experimenting with Hillerich’s methods, and… in the immortal words of the MST3K movie: “I’m feeling a sensation that’s entirely new to me. And frankly, I like it!”

Fantasy of Manners list on Goodreads. It took seeing that I had read eleven books on this list (and loved many of them) to realize that, gee, Lise, maybe fantasy of manners is a Thing, and furthermore maybe that’s actually what you’re writing.

Accomplishments

I got a lot of reading done this week, as you’ll see — but to be fair, it was mostly finishing a bunch of books I had in progress.

Writing
– Wrote 2,487 words on Lioness
– Prepped and sent chapters 6 and 7 of Lioness to my writing group
– Imported Lioness (and notes) into Scrivener
– Wrote one blog post, a review of Sheepfarmer’s Daughter